Disclaimer: We ( zazabelle and draksisreborn) own nothing but our OCs. Star Wars belongs to Lucasfilm and Disney. Please review and enjoy this latest installment.
"...In short, we might not have to build the data table at all! If I could install a section in BX's chest to integrate the power flow of lightsaber crystal, then we could have a walking data table-!"
Lerti and BX weren't paying much attention to Nek as the three of them sat in a city transport speeder on their way to the orb's directed coordinates. Lerti sat up front near the driver, head in her hand and helmet on her lap as she watched the rain streak off the hovercraft window while they soared in between city buildings and stayed within the near impossible lanes of 3-Dimensional traffic. Nek and BX sat in the back; Nek was still rambling on about his new design plans to no one in particular, unless you counted the driver, who didn't seem any more interested than the rest of them. BX sat stoically, head bent, staring down at the old rusted lightsaber he still gripped in his left claw.
BX had been unwilling to hold the orb again to see if the same coordinates would come up, so Lerti had to immediately recorded herself saying the series of latitudes and longitudes she could remember from the sequence before Nek compared them to the map of the city they had on file in the ship. The closest they could find to the sequence that Lerti remembered was a large living complex called "Iron Gate Residential" located on the southside of the 3rd quadrant in the sprawling planet-wide city. This wasn't impossibly far from docking depot The Raving Titan was being housed in, so a short city transport ride later, Lerti, Nek, and BX were now arriving on an entrance platform nearly 200 stories up the living complex.
As the cab slowed to a stop, Lerti gazed up at the skyscraping tower and cursed silently to herself as the ridiculousness of her life once again set in.
Paying the driver, Lerti nearly started cursing less to herself as they exited the cab. As soon as the engineer and the droid's door slammed shut, Lerti turned with a frown on her teeth.
"Did none of us think how we were going to know what apartment we're looking to head into?" She snapped, quickly shutting up Nek who had still been talking, "Or, what we're even looking for to begin with!?"
The two were quiet for a moment before Nek shrugged, "I mean, I figured we're looking for a holocron."
Lerti sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, "BX? Any ideas?"
Lerti looked up.
BX was gone.
"Wha the-? BX!?" Lerti called as Nek spun around to find the same nothingness.
Nek quickly pointed as he spotted the tall droid moving through the crowds and rain towards the living complex's 200th story entrance. Lerti and Nek jumped to action to keep up. The two called out to the droid but the commando seemed fixated on something in the distance.
They caught up just as BX was entering the building and saw the droid wasn't fixated on something far away but was instead holding the old rusty saber out in front of him almost as if he was holding a compass.
As the droid entered the 'lobby', or rather a very run down, big room with a receptionist and moldy smelly couches, Lerti grabbed BX's arm and, with effort, spun the droid to face her. BX's attention suddenly snapped to her as she hissed, "What are you doing!?"
"Following the sequence." The droid explained, motioning with the lightsaber.
Luckily the saber was so rusted, from a distance it likely resembled more of an old drainage pipe than a near-mythical weapon. Just to be safe, Nek eyed the Ithorian receptionist to look for a reaction but the alien's slug-like face didn't move away from the holonet screen she watched lazily from behind her desk.
"What do you mean?" Nek whispered as he turned back to the conversation, also keeping his voice down for their one audience member.
"There is a sequence of very subtle sounds rising from this device echoing off another device in this building and so I was following." BX explained in great detail.
"Sequence of sounds… you mean like a song? Like Vis talks about? How can you hear it?" Nek questioned with a hint of jealousy in his voice.
"I believe it is connected with the error that occured in my system earlier today. Or my trick circuit is acting up again, but the connection seemed viable enough to act on. Though the sound is very faint." BX explained with a shrug to his tone.
"That's so cool." Nek breathed.
Lerti snorted softly, "You sound like Vis."
"Well you smell like Vis." Nek retorted.
Before Lerti could begin to even scrape the surface of whatever that was supposed to mean, BX was off. Again the droid made his way across the lobby but this time Lerti and Nek simply followed. Stepping into an elevator at the other end of the room, BX stood for a moment, contemplating the nearly 400 floors worth of buttons on the inside of the elevator's panel.
He held out the saber in front of the buttons.
"3… 1. 4. This is the correct series." BX concluded as he selected Floor 314.
As the lift doors slid to a close, Nek caught a glimpse of the Ithorian receptionist lazily pointing to a plaque on the wall Nek hadn't seen before, her eyes never leaving the screen in front of her.
'Trespassers will be shot.' The sign read.
"Lovely." Nek sighed as the door clicked closed.
On the ride up, Lerti contacted Soron and updated him on their status and position. "From the looks of things we may be in for a heist, but we don't know who it is we're stealing the box from."
"Who knows?" Nek cut in, "Maybe it'll be some wise old Jedi who'll see the purity of our hearts and hand it over."
"Well… Maybe? No. Probably not." Soron's doubt filled voice responded over the comlink.
"Yeah, you're right." Nek's voice deflated.
With that, the elevator doors slid open and the three left the lift. Hanging up on Soron, Lerti and Nek followed as BX wove purposefully through the maze of hallways and rooms just on the 314th floor of the skyscraper.
The hallways reflected the 200th floor lobby that they'd entered in from: dark, dingy, and wrought with this planet's varieties of mold. And no doubt the rooms within also reflected that same proviso. The lights above them seemed to flicker with each step they took and voices could always be heard around each corner but each cause of the sound quieted before any of the three could make out a word.
Lerti had placed her helmet on in the lift but now kept her hands near her blasters at her sides and Nek reciprocated her caution by keeping a hand along the shaft of his double bladed vibroblade he had strung across his small, but sturdy form. BX, on the other hand, did not seem concerned with the lights or the voices. The normally alert and defensive droid seemed somehow distant as he held the saber in front of him, only adding further to the eerie nature of the situation.
BX suddenly came to a stop outside a room only one door away from the emergency exit door at the end of the hall. A notably prime spot for anyone needing conveniently to escape.
"Room B-214e. This is the correct sequence." BX announced in a hushed voice.
Lerti, snapping to attention, drew her weapons and made the motions for Nek and BX to get into position next to and in front of the door. BX crouched and backed away so his back was nearly touching the door across the hall. With Nek just across from her at the edge of the door frame, Lerti gave the signal for BX to scan the room for life signs.
After a moment BX silently looked to Lerti.
"Anyone home?" Lerti whispered.
"There are life signs in the room above and in the rooms two doors down but none in this room or its immediate neighbors." BX reported quietly.
"Alright. Nek? You want to be the one ot do the honors?" Lerti said motioning to the keypad on the door.
Nek nodded quietly and got to work debasing the keypad frame and rewiring the circuits holding the door shut. A few moments later, the door slid open. In the near silence of the dingy living space, the sound was deafening.
Lerti gave the signal for how they were to enter and the three of them slid into the pitch black room. But…
"Hold." Lerti commanded as they finished taking their positions, "Something's off."
The three stared curiously at the scene before them. It was no wonder there were no life signs of the neighboring rooms if this one was empty.
There was only one room.
BX's eye lights shined in through the open door. Nek inched forward, his eyes darting around the room.
"If I'm seeing this right, it looks like the two rooms directly to the right of this one have been knocked down and I think the two rooms in the hallway adjacent to this one have also been joined." Nek surmised quietly.
The space was filled with crates. Though, to Lerti it looked like a garage sale compared to the large scale black market operation that herself, Cenden, and Vis had stumbled upon in Tiss'sharl. Nonetheless it was still an impressive amount of things to put in the "one" room.
The three crept into the room, leaving the door open for extra light and the first point of escape if need be. Nek fidgeted where he stood with vibroblade at the ready, "BX, can you hear the singing?"
BX was quiet for a moment, looking towards the lightsaber like he was waiting for it to talk. The droid then nodded and pointed somewhere deep in the crate maze, "I believe it's somewhere in that direction."
Nek followed BX further into the darkness, his back to the droid and vibroblade extended as he watched the inky surroundings. Lerti stayed behind in the open space of light, blasters drawn.
She was exposed this way. Anyone coming in, or hiding within, would be more likely to focus on her and not the two procuring the item. Lerti gazed about, expectantly, for while BX's scans for lifeforms were mostly accurate according to his programming, but there were plenty of ways to trick a droid, especially one acting as strangely as theirs.
Listening to make sure she could still hear BX's clanking footsteps in the distance, Lerti allowed her attention to move from examining the darkness for shifting shadows to examining the storage room itself.
Even in the dim light, Lerti could make out the basic shapes of the crates around her. They weren't identical, so she figured this wasn't an official business like Jinx had, or even like Beebs carries out. Whoever was collecting these things didn't care about presentation.
"I sure have been stumbling into some real junk piles lately." Lerti said to herself thinking of the blackmarket of Tiss'sharl, Vis' mismatch temple, and just Cenden in general.
She heard a metallic snap sound from open somewhere in the storage room followed by the fainter sound of a lid being placed on the floor.
Lerti put her hand to the comlink button on her helmet, "Find what we came for?" Lerti asked.
"We found the holocron." BX's voice returned.
"Let's get out of here." Lerti said turning towards the door when something caught her eye. Something glinted in the dim shadows that stretched across the ceiling right above their escape route.
'A hatch? ...A hatch into the room above.' Lerti realized too late.
The metal hatch shifted.
A silhouetted figure fell to the ground blocking the door, the only thing Lerti could see was the glint of a smile revealed from beneath a wide-brimmed shadow.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
"I'm just saying," Nek whispered, "You being able to hear the kyber-crystal makes no sense, especially without the orb. I mean can't Jedi only do that stuff cause of stuff in their blood? You don't even have blood."
BX was receiving the sound of Nek's voice perfectly to his receptors and the data was being processed accordingly, but the droid had decided he couldn't hear him.
Nek wasn't interesting.
Interesting, to BX, involved acting outside of his calculations for reaction. Interesting meant that BX would feel that nearly inoperable loose wire in his head twitching and telling him to fix something. And the wire that caused, what Soron called "house cleaning mode", didn't care about Nek's rambling and his obvious questions.
BX knew what was possible and what wasn't. He'd been built to fight Jedi in The Clone Wars, as the war had been named. He knew how Force-sensitives operated, and they did interest him. Their spontaneous nature beyond his calculations, the way they defied odds, was a mathematical nightmare for someone built on the idea of calculating and defeating odds.
BX turned one of the dark corners, and stopped.
The sound had quieted to near nothingness.
Lightly shaking the lightsaber he held before him, he strained his receptors against Nek's babbling and continued on for a few more steps.
Nek's obvious questions were nagging at him. How was he hearing that slight… ringing? That was the only way the droid could think to describe it. A ringing sound pulsating in and out of the saber's rusted hilt, and somewhere in the distance, he could hear the same sound reverberating off of something else.
But truth be calculated, the sound was growing dimmer and dimmer by the moment. The sound was an anomaly in his system that he had first defined as an error. Sending him data that he had not previously stored, only for it to disappear upon his attempt at recovery. Not to mention the coordinates… It took nearly everything in his system not to reject the noise to his malware protection systems. But as long as that loose wire sparked...
The sound stopped.
BX lurched to a halt, Nek lightly bumping into the sudden stationary object in front of him.
"What?" Nek said urgently, once again spinning to watch BX's back.
The droid did not respond, he was now interested in his sudden lack of interest. The wire sparking in his head had gone dim.
BX turned in a circle, looking for something, anything that would make the interest begin again.
'If the drive of interest does not begin again, the engineer will again begin his talking which I don't want to hear.' BX ran this train of thought through his mind before turning and, completely at random, yanked open one of the crates.
Nek let out a small whistle as a faint blue light was cast into the room.
Inside the crate, sat a single holocron.
The crate had been specially designed to hold just this one thing, and appeared to be weighed to feel heavier in the anti-grav registry screen.
"Nice going BX. How'd you know it was in there?" Nek asked as he carefully lifted the holocron out of the crate.
"Odds…" BX answered quietly with a very human shrug while staring at the crate.
"Find what we came for?" Lerti's voice suddenly came over their comlinks.
"We found the holocron." BX answered.
"Let's get out of here."
The sound of metal grinding on metal shrieked out into the darkness.
Blaster fire rang out.
Nek cursed and, throwing the holocron into his backpack, ran to where they'd last seen Lerti.
BX's programming poised him to run, but suddenly his wire twitched and he looked at the lightsaber in his hand.
Blaster fire burst out in red light not far from him. He needed to move… but first.
Opening his back systems panel, BX wedged with difficulty, the lightsaber into his back before taking off.
Taking in the sounds of blaster fire and his crew mate's shouts combine with his life scan, BX picked out where the odd-ones-out stood.
Pistons in his legs and feet tensed.
BX launched himself upwards, he pushed off some of the stacked crates that became below him.
The "not crew member" was spotted in BX's flight off the crates and BX twisted his leg through the air as the ground came up to meet him.
The figure ducked and BX's foot snagged something that came flying off the figure's head. Tucking in his body as he connected with the ground, BX snatched the item off his foot and examined the wide brimmed hat he found in his claws.
"Hand the hat over junk pile, and I might consider letting you live after stealing my holocron." A metallically-garbled voice drawled as a blue wrinkled hand extended out from the figure standing across from BX.
BX's head shot up.
This time the wire didn't have to twitch, as raw memory data flooded his circuits with the voice match he had on file.
"Cad Bane, bounty-hunter employed under the Separtist Order." BX relayed.
"Formerly Separtist, currently Empire." He corrected nonchalantly.
"Wait, who?" Nek's voice struck out from where he and Lerti stood pushed up against the backs of two small crate walls, weapons still smoking.
The figure stepped slowly into the light, jet-boosters on his shoes clinking with each step. An old Duros emerged from the shadows, his blue skin was wrinkled and weathered. Around his neck was installed some sort of breathing device that ran metallic tubes from the square of his jaw to the center of his neck. His lipless mouth was pulled back into a scowl practiced over the ages, but his red eyes seemed to defy his age, piercing through his surroundings, swift and calculating.
BX readied himself.
"Am I supposed to know who this is!?" Nek again intervened.
The bounty-hunter smirked at this, and stopped to adjust the cuffs on his coat long, leathery trench-coat.
"No, no I suppose you wouldn't know me..." Bane paused, "But you will."
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Blaster bolts rained, replacing the sounds of the storm outside.
The old bounty hunter hadn't given them the chance to speak again, he'd barely given them the chance to find cover before he created a maelstrom of his own within the confines of his antique shop.
Lerti and Nek had dove out of the way in opposite directions, readying themselves behind crates.
BX stood his ground.
Tossing the hat aside, the droid launched forward, fist extended.
Bane spun.
CLANG! BX's fist plunged into the metal crate that had backed Bane before BX twisted his leg through the air attempting to connect to where the bounty hunter had maneuvered to.
From the corner of his lens, BX watched the blue blur duck and roll beneath his swing.
The man was behind him.
BX turned to move.
The panels that made up his back suddenly cried out as damage receptors flared to life with the two impacts that struck BX numb.
The droid collapsed to the ground for the second time today, just barely managing to receive the data that told him the old Duros had retrieved his tossed hat back onto his head as he turned and walked away.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Lerti heard the loud metallic thump, she assumed to be BX, vibrate through the floor as blaster fire suddenly returned in full force.
'He's just trying to spook us out, that's why he's not coming to us. Maybe he knows he can't take on two against one?' Lerti's mind raced.
In her time with her own clan, she'd heard of Cad Bane, but never in all of her time touring the galaxy had she wished she'd been paying more attention to what people gossiped about.
'What are the odds…?' Lerti thought, shifting her weight as she remembered catching BX's monotoned worded drifting over the com's.
"Nek? We're going to need a distraction." Lerti spoke over her comlink softly as blaster fire still rained steadily down on her.
"I don't have visual on the bounty hunter, but I'll try and take out the turret gun!" Nek said hastily.
"Turret gun!?"
Lerti's eyes darted over her shoulder.
Sure enough a blaster turret had unfolded from a near invisible panel in the ceiling, that was what was shooting at her.
Lerti's head turned as she ducked back down.
A face. Inches from her own.
A hand shot out and threw the rest of his weight against her.
Lerti shot in front of her just before her helmeted skull smashed against the ground and the world pierced with white, searing light.
Clenching her teeth, Lerti pushed herself off the ground in a flurry of blind, dizzying clouds of pain and nausea.
She swung out her leg.
Nothing.
A fist suddenly knocked her across the face.
Lerti twisted her stance in the direction the blow had come from as her vision began clearing.
She found Bane standing only a foot away. Launching herself forward, she feigned a sweep of the leg before throwing her shoulder forward.
Her shoulder connected with his chest before an arm appeared around her neck and, what she guessed was a fist, buried itself in her kidney. She found herself doubled over but didn't remember again hitting the ground.
The world swam as she heard Nek scream.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Nek launched himself off the tops of the crate stack, vibroblade poised to strike. He plunged the simple staff adorned with adjacent twin blades down to strike the old blue man.
The Duros twisted as Nek struck.
Right before Nek's feet met the ground, he felt a tug on where his staff had dug into the air. Cad Bane suddenly had his grip on the staff. Nek's single foot hit the ground as Cad yanked the staff, swinging it's other sharp end into Nek's chest.
Nek stumbled back in off-balanced surprise, but hadn't released his grip on the blade.
He felt blood begin to leak from his chest where, luckily, only one of the sharp pommels had pierced him.
"You should really leave the sword swinging to the Jedi." the bounty hunter drawled, looking Nek up and down as he released his grip on the staff, "Speaking of Jedi, what are you three planning on doing with a Jedi holocron?"
Nek glanced at Lerti. She still lay on the floor, her head bobbing about as she attempted to raise it up but her helmet seemed to be imitating a block of stone attached to her neck. And BX…
Before Nek even had a chance to glance over his shoulder, Bane fired a shot inches from Nek's head and into the crate behind him. Nek jumped and locked eyes with Bane.
"Answer the question." Bane said with a sigh, almost as if he couldn't be bothered by any of them. "Not sure that crate of explosives behind you deserves to take another hit like that though. But I'll give it another go if it means filling you with shrapnel." Bane threatened as he backed a few steps away, slowly.
Nek's stomach dropped a floor and his mind raced.
'I'm going to die. I'm going to die. Be brave? Stupid. Plea for mercy? He might not let you live. Going to die. Going to-'
"Like I'd tell you!" Nek shouted.
'Stupid.' Nek thought.
Lerti bellowed as her body suddenly pulled off the ground towards Bane.
A blue stun ray erupted from his blaster and Lerti's war cry was silenced as she fell to the ground in complete stillness.
Nek stared at her unmoving form for a moment before he noticed the metallic clanking sound rushing in from behind him.
BX dove over the crates that were stacked behind Nek, smoke still trailing from his haul. It was a wonder he could move let alone perform acrobatics.
Cad Bane smiled and pressed a button on a wrist gauntlet hidden under his sleeve.
BX's body lurched suddenly mid-air before flying up to stick to the ceiling.
Nek watched his happen and slowly turned his attention to the bounty hunter, "…Y-you couldn't have sprung for any floor mounted t-traps?"
The Duros motioned with his gun, "They're technically on the floor in my apartment."
Cad Bane aimed the barrel of his gun at Nek, a hand placed confidently on his belt.
"And now you know." Bane added as he pulled the trigger.
Blue light enveloped him, sucking Nek into darkness.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
I opened my eyes as I pretended to lay stunned on the floor.
The game ended there for now. Everyone was sitting in darkness.
I sat up, feeling shocked.
"Should… Should we be worried about that?" I asked from the floor of the sparring room.
"I'm not sure, is that really what's going on?" Chol's gruff voiced asked from his sitting position on a nearby chair.
I'd set up shop in the sparring room, my papers lay strewn across the floor. Some of them rotting old temple papers, others freshly scribbled ideas from my own mind with the orb sitting on top of a pile of lightsabers I used to keep it from rolling around.
I shrugged at Chol, "It's not like I normally don't have other people around to test how accurate the things I think and say are. And it doesn't normally seem like these things are happening in real time. More like… past time I think."
Chol nodded and heaved himself to a standing position, "I'll let Soron know something might've happened, 'because of course it did,'" He added one of Soron's favorite sayings as he turned to leave the room.
"We need to go help them! Soron and Cenden might not get there in time!" I stood and ignited my own lightsaber.
"NO!" Chol cried out, taking a step back.
I felt fear wash over me as I switched off the saber.
"I-I mean, no." Chol's posture visibly relaxed as he cleared his throat, "You keep working on your… uh… homework."
At that, I felt my guide tangle about my limbs, an idea forming in my head. This was where I was needed I guess…
I watched Chol leave the room and I threw my lightsaber back down into its pile, "I guess I should play a game then…" I said as I put a finger to my lip in thought and squeezed my eyes shut.
'Why is Chol scared of lightsabers? And this isn't HOMEWORK, it's RESEARCH… Homework is for school-people… School-people? That sounds sort of fun... I guess I can pretend this is homework and I'm at real school?' This shook the worried feeling right off as I gathered void-conjured, faceless classmates around me.
I snatched up a paper off the ground that I'd been reading on kyber-crystals, pushed my back against the wall, and bent my legs like I was sitting in a desk. Leaning over to the "kid" next to me, I whispered,
"Pst! Hey Tiphanie! What'd you get for number S-12?"
The faceless kid glanced at the front of the room before answering, "I got: The meaning of the universe is 42."
"Huh… Well what'd you get for number 42?"
"Ms. Alacritis! Passing notes again? Is there something you'd like to share with the class?" My faceless teacher barked as she hastened over.
"No Mrs. TheForce!" I said as my legs gave out from sitting against the wall. I stood from the ground as "my teacher" yanked the paper from my hand.
"Well we might as well read it now that you've disrupted everyone's time."
My freckles turned red as I felt the eyes of all my classmates staring at me.
My teacher put on her spectacles on her faceless-face and turned up her chin to make out the words. "You know we have tutoring time if you're struggling with the subject, Vis."
I winced at this, "I'm just… embarrassed I don't know the answer."
"You don't have to know the answer all on your own," she said before reading the excerpt of scroll, "The crystal is, by itself, the power source of the weapon. Like the Force user, the crystal is attuned to the Force. Without that attunement, the crystal is just a rock. And while a non-Force user could probably ignite and wield a lightsaber, the crystal is needed to be properly attuned to the Force. But for a Jedi, the lightsaber becomes more: it is a manifestation of a Jedi's connection to the Force." Now. Who wrote this and why?"
I fidgeted, "I… I don't know."
"Well, let's ask another question. WHEN was this written?"
Her faceless gaze was right in front of me now. She held out the paper for me to take, but I kept looking into the blur manifested by my mind even as I took the paper.
As my hand held the paper, I felt the Force building up in my head. I winced as the feeling grew painful. All I could hear was a ringing in my ears, and all I could see was the foggy blur slowly morphing, slowly combining. But I couldn't see anything…
'I can't see anything…' I looked down wide-eyed at the paper, "I can't see anything! CHOL! I NEED TO TALK TO CENDEN!"
I ran through the mist of people that didn't exist into the empty halls beyond. The scroll bit with histories of kyber-crystal still clutched in my hand.